I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days.
I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.
That's not how federation works? You wouldn't log into Mozilla's matrix server with another Matrix server's login, you would just join the :mozilla.org rooms with your normal Matrix account. That's the whole point of federation.
It sounds like you were trying to login to Mozilla's Element web client and it was only set up to authenticate against the Mozilla homeserver but A) that's a client setting unrelated to federation or really the protocol in general and B) not what you were supposed to be doing to begin with.
Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.
In my opinion, the real fix to scam, spam, and robocalls is to pass along the REAL(TM) Caller ID information not just the caller ID but the actual billed Caller ID information and allow the recipient easy ways to drop the calls when those two don't match. I don't know exactly the technical details of Stir/Shaken but someone somewhere is paying / getting paid for each call and this information should be transparently available to the call or message recipient. For "legitimate" reasons like doctors or call centers, they should already provide a separate work phone and not make them use their personal line. For leaky carriers, those should be blocked entirely. Nothing good comes from them. Basically what I am suggesting is if the full attestation level ("A-level") is not available, drop those calls and text messages by default unless the customer opts in (I have no idea why anyone would)
I was nodding in agreement, but I realized there must be some catch here. If this was that simple it probably could've been implemented a while ago.
My guess is that there's some requirement that if it's a working number, it must be able to dial emergency services and that's the loophole that's being exploited. So the FCC's answer is if all numbers must work, push the check directly on the subscriber.
In theory, yes. I would hope all the things that are "common sense" and "simple" would have already been implemented. However, as my professor of History from college loved to say "follow the money". If something could be simple and straightforward but is implemented in a convoluted way that is clearly suboptimal, someone somewhere makes more money as a result. It could be as transparent as Google Chrome implementing auto play with a "Media Engagement Index (MEI)", Apple being forced to implement USB-C on the iPhone kicking and screaming, or carriers and large call centers dragging their feet on doing STIR/SHAKEN correctly and passing along the billing information that I will remind you they already have because they like to get paid. So, while we hope common sense previals, at the end of the day, it only does so automatically when it makes business sense.
To your point about emergency services—while it's true that any unactivated phone must be allowed to dial 911, that rule only opens a one-way path to emergency dispatch. It doesn't give a device the ability to place outbound calls to everyday citizens. The real loophole isn't a public safety mandate; it's the wholesale VoIP market.
This was the post where I learned about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC which seems like a nice technical win. It isn't text encryption but it goes to show there is still room to improve on the basic email situation.
JMAP's been Fastmail's future of email since circa 2016 iirc; it seems unlikely Google will ever get on board (NIH?) so it's doomed to remain not completely standard and fairly niche/popular but struggling for (technical) support.
We'll see. I think mass JMAP adoption is really waiting for either apple (mail.app) or google (gmail) to jump on it.
My favorite feature of JMAP is that it gives you a single, consistent API endpoint that works for native clients, webmail and programmatic clients (like, backup scripts and things like that). JMAP means you don't have to invent your own REST API for webmail. Unfortunately, gmail, yahoo mail and all the rest predate JMAP. So it doesn't really help them in the same way.
It'd be lovely to get thunderbird working with JMAP!
What stops Ford or General Motors from creating a "startup" that is not bound by its existing agreements with its dealership network to sell a new vehicle direct to consumers "in select states" where the law allows this? I mean any state where the Tesla is sold should allow this, right?
"Activist" Shareholders, primarily. Ford several years ago floated the idea of building its EV division as an almost entirely separate direct-to-consumer sub-company (specifically designed to directly compete with Tesla) and it got shutdown hard by shareholders.
Many of the biggest shareholders of both GM and Ford are their respective dealers. Shamefully this conflict of interest and reversal of some key controls is deeply entrenched in the US all the way back to the original lawsuit Dodge Brothers v Ford, which is also the dark origin of phrases like "fiduciary duty to shareholders", where then dealer network and automotive supply chain moguls the Dodge Brothers sued Ford for wanting to take record profits and reinvest them in R&D and asked that Ford give a record dividend instead (as its "fiduciary duty to shareholders"). They used that dividend to help finance their rival Dodge car manufacturer. In hindsight it is such a bizarre sequence of conflicts of interest that we're still dealing with the consequences of today (in how it created such quarterly earnings-focused myopia in US corporations), including specifically in the various ways that GM and Ford can't easily create a "startup" with no dealer network to stay competitive in EVs, why both are generally starved of R&D money compared to "startup" competitors, and also it all relates to why they are "too big to fail" given how much of the US economy is built on top of conflicts of interest and overlaps between them, their dealers, their supply chain, and their shareholders.
I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.
Yes, I realize how easily language can be manipulated.
For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.
It's especially frustrating watching congressional hearings. Since both "sides" are aware that the cameras are rolling and that they are there to score points/create soundbites (rather than actually learn from each other--god forbid) it's just both sides talking past each other and not doing the analytical work of a good conversation.
Even when I'm on one side of the argument, it's just as frustrating to hear my own side just move on to their next pre-written question/response instead of engaging with the underlying issues. I want substantive debate and discussion and possibly consensus, but that's sadly not the reality in most cases of import.
There is no "our side" and that's the problem. There are issues with a clear majority 80% plus voters agree on and steadily over decades and yet veto points (filibuster, committee chairs, holds) plus donor capture means a motivated minority with money can block majority-supported policy indefinitely.
You can always have arguments with philosophy or case law or whatever that for example carried interest loophole is good for America but overwhelming majority of US Americans support scraping it. Why haven't been able to do that? How many people benefit from this loophole? (Estimates are just a few thousands of people who benefit, not millions in a country of over three hundred million). Similarly, the IRS Direct File system was a modest improvement over the status quo. Why was it scrapped? How many people benefit from this?
Remember SVB? Remember how everyone who opposed TARP suddenly supported bailing out SVB depositors just because now these were companies in which they had invested?
The point is there can't be a real debate when the outcome of the debate determines your paycheck.
Kind of tangential but the picture has floppies so... I absolutely hated floppies. I could never tell when one would go bad. I would ride my bicycle to a cyber cafe, send and receive emails and save text files or whatever to my floppy to bring back home to read but sometimes they just randomly failed. No idea why or how. Something about CRC failed. I'll take solid state drives or USB flash drives over floppy disks for daily use any day.
Sure, I don't like him either but it shouldn't be about him. It should be about the institutions we trusted to keep our index funds safe. Or was this always based on "vibes"? Was VOO never safe? Was it always possible for the people in charge of the stock market to simply include some money pit into our retirement funds? I feel like the people responsible for these decisions must fear life in prison or this will keep happening.
These are indices created by private entities. They are free to change their rules are they not? Maybe this is the wake up call to the risks of concentrated passive investment vehicles the public needed.
If you think it's a wakeup call about passive investment I think you're asking the wrong question. The vast majority of people do not want to become experts in the financials of 800 different companies in order to maximize their account return on investment over the next 20 years. It's a part time job to do that. Some people do that successfully but most people recognize that they won't. Passive investment was supposed to be a tool for those people. If you ignore all of that, then sure they can just change the rules whenever they like. But that totally ignores the reason a lot of these rules exist in the first place. In my book we're about to get a taste of why we don't want private enterprise responsible for this stuff in the first place.
Exactly all this. The whole idea of passing investing is "hardly any of us know better than the market as a whole." If you don't agree with that, then you don't agree with passive investing. Which, whatever. Live your life.
But the story is not about all indices being wrong, the story is about index management being corrupted. Like bond ratings on mortgages in the run-up to 2008.
> Passive investment was supposed to be a tool for those people.
And it was, for a while. Then financial vultures realized there's huge pots of money tied up for 40+ years in funds that the person doesn't directly manage or have a say in. And if the investments are in indices then the index gets to vote on company matters across the economy on your behalf. What could go wrong?
If you dont like it, you need to choose something else. I dont know how people can keep throwing money at the thing they dont like and then complain it isnt doing what they want.
"Im too busy to spend 30 minutes to move my retirement somewhere I trust" just doesnt cut it.
I'm happy for you that you're always the perfectly informed player in every transaction you ever make having the most up to date information, ensuring that you're getting the best deal possible at any given second, groceries and all.
Sadly, some poor slobs are too lazy to be as informed as you.
I do none of those things, but I understand that there is a chance of losing money gambling in the stock market. Its not a free lunch with 100% upside.
I'm not arguing for myself, I'm arguing for the tens of millions of people who do not understand this system, are not aware of how it works, and are constantly pressured through employer plans, tax deferment, and other aspects of the system to choose the path of least resistance and put their money into a 401k. For a system to work properly it has to account for all of the users and not the top 5% or 1% of the users.
> For a system to work properly it has to account for all of the users and not the top 5% or 1% of the users.
The system doesn't work properly. Retirement is fundamentally broken in the US. The sooner people realize and wake up to that the sooner things might change.
A "401(k)" is not a monolithic entity. In practice, most employers offer a choice of funds, with the most popular being a year-targeted fund that rebalances between equities and bonds as you get closer to retirement. Having said that, you can probably dump your entire portfolio into government bonds, small cap stocks, or euro futures.
I have had jobs with good 401ks and terrible ones. The terrible ones usually have some bond/ saving option. When you leave the job you stick the money in a full service brokerage IRA. The problem is when you are at the same job for too long.
Doesn’t it say that it’s a retirement fund, intended to be saved until retirement age? The 10% penalty is little more than a wrist slap level deterrent, too. It’s usually like ~1 year of returns. Not a huge deal if you need to dip into it.
(There’s plenty to criticize about the whole 401k system of retirement accounts. But these criticisms seem misguided)
People putting retirement funds in a pile of companies that often have little impact on local communities they live in.
They’re changing laws to fast-track sketchy IPOs, putting hard earned money at risk why? So we can send people on a death-mission to Mars?
Point being, they are doing what they will with other people’s money and won’t suffer the consequences. Removing the checks and balances is exactly how financial disasters happen.
Exactly right, there's even ones so conservative they market themselves as cash equivalent. Basically zero gain/loss in those funds. If you're so worried then go login to your 401k and change it.
If I could pick from any possible retirement plan, I'd want in on the UK pension system that's guaranteed to beat inflation and earnings growth. Until the money runs out, at least!
Because it's not an actual investment and can't run out. Like US Social Security and many other national schemes, the UK is pay-as-you-go. Money coming in is immediately paid out.
Any funds lying around are supposed to be for temporary imbalances, but became significant due to a major demographic imbalance: the Baby Boom.
You can buy i-bonds in the US. You are limited in how much though. They are pegged above CPI. You never hear about them because no one makes money on it. And maybe it isn't that great of an investment.
I believe the (apparently AGI-pilled?) folks running the indices are more afraid of the public’s pitchforks in the scenario where the AI stocks go public at $3T value, then increase to $30T before the index rules dictate they buy in. Hence the rule change to prevent that from happening.
For a moment step into the theory of mind of the AI believer. That’s the common mindset in finance today. You believe that AI is displacing white collar work, and soon with robots it will displace physical work. Your personal job is to help set the rules for stocks to be included in the index. You believe that the point of indices is for passive investors to automatically be invested in the diversified set of top public companies (weighted by market cap). During previous economic shifts, where companies went public early and were already in the index during their growth phase, passive investors broadly benefited from that growth. These new AI companies have stayed private much longer, meaning that the index has missed the opportunity to “buy low” and build up a stake so far.
You believe that the owners of the leading AI companies stand to become owners of most wealth. Furthermore, that we are at an inflection point where the value of these companies rises so rapidly that delays in index investment will set in stone a permanent inequality, where early tech VC and other private funds own a huge portion of the economy. The few-$T downside risk of AI bubble popping this year feels to you like a minor concern compared to index funds being shut out of this wealth due to some arbitrary rules, which have been changed before and can be changed again. Delaying investment in these huge public companies feels like a more dangerous decision than buying in when they become public.
In short, there are two possible stories here:
1) Wall Street is AGI-pilled and thinks AI companies will be worth many trillions of dollars
2) Wall Street expects the AI bubble to pop and is trying to make the public into bag holders by selling a few hundreds of billions of dollars in the IPO
I think the second story actually doesn’t hold together, because Wall Street is making a bunch of correlated bets. The IPO cash is just one more source of capital, and much of it going to be used to make investments which are also correlated bets.
It doesn't matter what individuals believe. The rules exist to prevent people from doing dumb things that destabilize the market and when those rules are bypasses for belief reasons then the market will take that into account and discount the rules and the market loses its integrity. At that point you have signaled that the rules exist in order to facilitate corruption not oppose it, and you end up who knows where, but it certainly isn't better.
1) If the AI companies do end up running half the economy, we will have discussion for the rest of the human history about how the public got scammed by not being able buy in earlier at a lower price and how the late IPOs set in stone the oligarchy.
2) If the AI companies crash and burn, we will have discussion for several years about how everyone involved in running and financing them is a scoundrel who needs to go to jail for scamming us by selling us stock.
No, they absolutely don't fear prison (but they should).
It's just the aggregate behaviour of a group of people optimizing for short term profit and self-enrichment over everything and without any need for long-term careful planning because for various reasons they are pursuing the short term at all costs.
This was always the endgame of moving away from managed pensions to 401k's. First you get everyone's retirement income into the stock market, and then you use the stock market to take it all away from them.
something that came to my mind as I was reading the comments here -- the thing is that in the quest for professionalism, we have sidelined a lot of people who would be good at teaching in favor of people who are good at jumping hoops. there is a famous quote saying "when the measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"
Goodhart's Law (that quote) is actually one of the motivations for moving away from ACT and SAT as college entry benchmarks. "Teaching to the test" is a rampant problem in the US.
UC is seeing flaws in departing from those benchmarks, though. The thing is, % of students getting admitted to college is itself a measure for schools and school districts. If GPA is how you get kids into college, well...
It's not a teacher problem, it's a district and state problem. As a teacher, if kids are failing your classes (which nowadays seems to be "getting anything less than an A") your school district blames you.
To me, it seems that Goodhart's Law is an inherent problem for education in the information era, no matter how you cut it. If there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're relatively difficult for schools to game. GPA inflation is trivial.
With standardized testing, you lose a lot of detail about how the student got to their answer. Nuance is lost. But yeah I agree, with math it seems like that isn't such a big problem compared to, say, reading or science.
It does create some perverse incentives, to be sure. "Test mills" are an ongoing issue, especially in urban areas, in both public and charter schools. Basically admin guts all liberal arts programs, theater, music, history, etc, institutes some draconian discipline system, and kids just do practice tests over and over until they graduate from high school. Great standardized test scores, and virtually zero practical value to be had from the education the kids received. I know someone who got a 30 on the ACT and didn't learn that Africa was a continent and not a country until 9th grade.
> ...actually one of the motivations for moving away from ACT and SAT as college entry benchmarks. "Teaching to the test" is a rampant problem in the US.... If there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're relatively difficult for schools to game.
You understand that you're contradicting yourself here, yes? The entire point is to have a difficult-to-game test. Teaching people to do well on the SAT looks an awful lot like actually getting them to understand the things that the SAT is intended to ensure they understand (plus a little bit of generic test-taking skill that would apply equally well to any test in the same format). And if you don't have that, you only have things that are worse.
I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite
pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure
with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you
want? What am I missing?
Human biology likely makes it harder to write on a glass screen with a perceptible Gap in time, latency between where the pen is and where the pixels appear as well as the physical colocation Of the pencil tip and the written line differs more so on a tablet screen than on direct application of matter to paper.
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the
handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
That isn't a matter of human biology. You learned to expect a specific experience when you took pencil to paper at a young age. Other people can learn to expect different experiences. Your acquired habits are not a genetic imperative. All of this post seems like ex post facto justifications for an implicit claim that the tech you grew up with is natural and good and the tech that came later is somehow inimical to life.
The point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what the best tools to achieve that are.
Those students that have the discipline and have an iPad and can use Goodnotes or Notability they are just gonna be ahead of the rest, like typing the earlier you learn the better off you’re going to be, and there are no shortcuts if you are a student.
Why do we even want to pay $500 per device for something that is easily replicated by a $1 paper notebook? The only people that benefit from forcing classrooms to adopt these devices is big tech relying on corporate welfare to juice their books.
I recall some research in the TV age. They observed, if the subject is looking into a light source, (be it a camp fire, a screen or a bulb) they go into a kind of sleepwalking mode. They also mentioned the phenomenon was already well documented by hypnotists.
In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.
I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.
You also don't get the physicality as part of recall with eInk over real books. When reading technical books, as an example, I often would look back when going to review something based on where it was physically in the book... I completely lose that with ebooks.. I still mostly use ebooks and online docs these days all the same because moving hundreds of pounds of books when you move sucks.
At least with OLED, the light output can be auto-adjusted to match the reflecting light of the environment. This can be quite convincing, looking like a purely reflective surface. And a dedicated app doesn’t need to use any distracting animations or highlights.
I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use paper?
I’m not an advocate of using tablets in class, I was just curious where the parent is seeing unavoidable distractions, compared to traditional tools like for example textbooks and calculators.
Blue light changes the way you think. Makes it easier to focus on the thing emitting the light, than the rest of the room. Just having a screen, with perfectly locked down control, can distract.
It's just not as good as a notebook. I've tried to make it as good. It sleeps, there's too much fumbling around with it to get to what you want. You lose the muscle memory of where something is in the book, you can't quickly flip to anything. You notice you used to do certain things, like flip to two different pages at once. Everything is just immediate and tactile.
It's also probably good to make sure students know how to figure using a pencil and paper because pulling a calculator out on a job site is pretty impractical.
Not sure I agree with that last point... you probably have one in your pocket already (phone app). Though I'm strongly against electronic devices as core education materials in K-6 especially.
For awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices. Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to me.
if we can tolerate latency for AI data centers why not build them in the middle of nowhere with solar panels, huge battery banks, and fiber connections? What am I missing? It is truly doable now though with sodium batteries. It is more expensive sure but it is doable. We need to not subsidize these data centers first though. These things need to pay their full cost including environmental cost.
I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.
even mastodon figured out federation.
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